It is a specific feeling. You are three hours into an edit, you reach for a shot you were sure you had, and it does not exist. The location is two hours away, or the light has gone, or the event is over.
What you can actually do
- 01Check every clip, not just the ones you named. It is genuinely often there, filmed at the end of another take.
- 02Reframe an existing shot. A crop into a wide can stand in for a medium if you have resolution to spare.
- 03Cover it with something else — a related B-roll clip, a still, a graphic. The viewer does not know what was meant to be there.
- 04Restructure so the shot is not needed. Often the fastest fix: cut the section that required it.
- 05Film a substitute somewhere else. Details, hands and close-ups rarely reveal their location.
- 06Reshoot only that shot. Cheaper than it sounds if it is a single insert.
Why it happened
Almost never carelessness. The two real causes are structural:
- There was no list, so "everything" was held in your head while you were also operating a camera and thinking about performance.
- There was a list, but it was in story order while you were filming in location order — so shots eleven rows apart got skipped because you were working at the other end of the document.
This is the problem Storeyz was built for. Your shots stay in story order on the board, shoot mode groups them by location for the day, and you tick each one off as you get it. When every box at a location is ticked, you can leave.